David Borrett's Column: Andover Bridge Street from the 1930s

Though posted in 1943, it must have been taken somewhat earlier than that, perhaps in the early 1930s.

Here on the left is a recently-established motor garage, which had replaced the timber and tiled shed of the Andover Coal Company.

The business was run by Bernard and Harold Macklin, who were Ford specialists.

The two brothers were the sons of a Salisbury jeweller of Catherine Street, so it was a real change of family career for them.

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The elder, Bernard, saw heroic service in the First World War and was twice awarded the Military Cross, while Harold was a flight cadet who, because the war ended, never saw any active service but nevertheless would have been taught all about engines, vital for his future work as a car mechanic.

The garage was certainly in operation by 1924 as an aerial view of the town of that date, clearly shows it.

To the rear was a large open area which appears to be the property of Percy George Ford (nothing to do with Ford cars) who owned an Andover repository and is listed on the electoral registers at the same address as the garage, though he lived at Clatford.

It seems likely that the Macklin brothers either built a garage on land rented from Ford or took over some recently-built premises belonging to him.

Directly behind the roadside premises was Bridge House, where both brothers’ families appear to be living in 1939, according to the register taken at the outbreak of war, though strangely this is not borne out by the Kelly’s directories around the same time which lists them elsewhere in the town and at separate addresses.

The garage and the area around it was acquired by the Wilts and Dorset bus company soon after World War II and it became a bus station.

The Macklin building however, survived until a brand-new bus station was built in the mid-1950s, at a cost of £50,000.

Both brothers left the town after the demise of the business: Bernard died aged 84 in 1977 at Bideford, Devon, while the younger Harold was only 61 when he died in 1959 at Bournemouth.

On the opposite side of the street is the old and extensive Co-op premises, which many readers will remember well.

It was actually the fourth set of premises that the Co-op had occupied in Andover.

The first, in 1901, was a small shop in New Street which lasted only a few months.

Then the company moved to Bridge Street, but on the opposite side of the road to pre-existing buildings just beyond the garage and which still stand.

In 1909, new premises were built on the same site as in the photograph but they were necessarily smaller than what came later because the lease of the Catherine Wheel Coffee Tavern next door did not expire until 1921.

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Finally, the coffee tavern was swept away and new buildings were erected in 1922.

Many will remember the pneumatic tube system that was part of the Co-op’s means of payment, whereby the customer’s cash and invoice were put in a metal canister and sent up to the office through the action of compressed air, where it was processed.

Any change due was sent back to the cash desk, together with a receipt.

The buildings on the site today were built for the Co-op in the 1970s as its final manifestation in Andover, but to great regret locally, this last-surviving Andover department store was closed in 1986.

Andover Bridge Street today (Image: Newsquest)